[POETRY] shadrach, meshach, abednego & eric

for ek.

today i will visit your grave after three years,
I am eager to know what has become of your black stained chest.

& at your burial, your dissected limbs that
were placed side by side makes me think 
of the doll’s limbs my little sister is spending
 her childhood dissecting from its torso.

sometimes I wish my uncle would've been the fourth Hebrew brother to come out of fire alive.
 
all bodies dead are to subside into dust, what has happened  to 
a body we believe burned out like a paper into ashes?

& the half body and ashes we lowered into the ground,
 that's how we planted this grief that is spreading its veins in our bodies.

there's no sanctified grief in raising 
a child from the womb then dip him into a hill of ashes.

Jeremy T. Karn writes from somewhere in Liberia. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry Volume III, The Whale Road, Ice Floe Press, ARTmosterrific, The Rising Phoenix, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Lolwe, Minute Magazine, FERAL Poetry, Liminal Transit Review, The Kissing Dynamite, Ghost Heart Literary Journal, and elsewhere.